Some of the points I found interesting is that the scneario in Fukushima and Daichi nuclear plants is like hanging from a cliff with your finger tips. He also believes that not all relevant information are getting to the public. And various countries may see the problem as bigger than what's being let on by some of the poeple in charge in Japan. He thinks that the Japanese military may have to get involved.

Dr. Kaku is very adept at explaining complex ideas in relatively simple terms. I remember reading (well, sort of) his book Hyperspace back in the day at the suggestion of my 6th grade teacher. Fascinating.

Like most talking heads on the media circuit, the only information Dr. Kaku has access to is what's already freely available in the public arena and supplied by the groups accused of hiding or downplaying the severity of the situation. Everything else is opinion, misinformation and speculation pandering to the fears of the audience for the sake of publicity.

Simply being Japanese doesn't make him more of an expert. I'd listen to him when it comes to string theory, not nuclear incident response.

Being a theoretical physicist still doesn't make him an expert in nuclear engineering, reactors, or incident response.

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This. I mean, Dr. Kaku's awesome, but just because you're a theoretical physicist doesn't automatically make you smart at figuring out how nuclear reactors work. Heh, must have gotten his degree from the same school as the jokers at NASA who claim Pluto isn't a planet.

I'm confused, is this nuclear problem under control or not? The media seems to be switching from "oh yeah, everything's gonna be fine" to "ZOMG WORSE THAN CHERNOBYL!" and back at the drop of a hat.

I have kinda fell behind on the news there, but those kinda things are really not easy to just fix, I am not a fan of "world wide" groups of anything, but a world wide group of folks who are super experts at nuclear reactor problems and are equipped with planes to fly anywhere along with whatever tools they need to fix the problems with proper multinational funding and representation would actually be really fantastic.

This. I mean, Dr. Kaku's awesome, but just because you're a theoretical physicist doesn't automatically make you smart at figuring out how nuclear reactors work. Heh, must have gotten his degree from the same school as the jokers at NASA who claim Pluto isn't a planet.

I'm confused, is this nuclear problem under control or not? The media seems to be switching from "oh yeah, everything's gonna be fine" to "ZOMG WORSE THAN CHERNOBYL!" and back at the drop of a hat.

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They'll get it under control eventually, but like any large scale industrial disaster it's a long, slow, careful process. Just look at the Chiba oil refinery. It took them ten days to put out that fire and even then it was only because it ran out of fuel.

So..why haven't they just gone the Chernobyl route and sanded and concreted them up?

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Because that's the absolute last resort for the worst case scenario. If possible they'll want to get the situation under control, decontaminate, and dismantle the reactors rather than bury them and hope for the best.

Chernobyl had to be buried because the reactor had no containment and the core was left sitting there completely uncovered, on fire, and exposed to the air for two weeks while convection from the fire forced massive amounts of contaminated material up into the atmosphere. It doesn't get much worse than that.